Taking a shower at the high school, Tommy (the Kitten) Cavanaugh kids Ugly Palmers. "Ugly, if you think the world is coming to an end," he says, "what are you wasting your time here at this jail for? You gonna need American history up there?"

(place of confinement): Like many nouns denoting places where people spend time, jail requires no article after certain prepositions: hence in jail ‎(“detained in a jail”), go to jail ‎(“become detained in a jail”), and so on. The forms in a jail, go to a jail, and so on do exist, but tend to imply mere presence in the jail, rather than detention there.

Until Monopoly popularised the spelling jail in the UK and Australia, gaol was the standard spelling in these countries.